BROTHER
HL-4070CDW Workgroup Laser Printer: $499
www.brother-usa.com

WHILE IT'S CONVENIENT FOR EVERY EMPLOYEE IN AN SMB TO HAVE HIS own printer, that’s certainly not the most cost-effective way for your customers to be spending IT dollars. Instead, upsell a high-performance workgroup printer designed to crank out print jobs from multiple systems without breaking a sweat.

For example, Brother International’s HL-4070CDW can churn 21 pages per minute. Two paper trays—one 250-sheet and another 50-page multipurpose tray—simultaneously provide access to letter-sized, legal, and executive pages. The HL-4070CDW also supports an optional tray for a total capacity of 800 sheets. Brother’s solution is rated for a lofty 35,000 pages monthly.

Being a workgroup laser, 10/100 Ethernet connectivity is naturally built in. You can also use the included 802.11g print server or USB 2.0 direct-attach option. The HL-4070CDW’s print engine handles resolutions up to 2400x600 dpi, yielding roughly 2,500 printed pages per toner cartridge.

SEAGATE
Cheetah NS Enterprise Hard Drive: $759
www.seagate.com

YOU'RE PROBABLY FAMILIAR with Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive family, a staple in high-end server applications requiring 24x7 loading and high performance. Of course, the trade-off for spinning magnetic media at insanely fast speeds is capacity limit. The largest Cheetah 15K.5 drive tops out at 300GB.

Eager to give capacity-hungry customers an enterprise drive with room to stretch, Seagate took the 15K.5 development platform, dropped its spin speed to 10,000 RPM, added perpendicular recording technology, and upped the ceiling to 400GB of space. One side effect of the slower spindle is better power efficiency: Seagate cites a 67% improvement in gigabytes per watt.

Because the Cheetah NS centers on the 15K.5 platform, it offers better performance than Seagate’s 10K.7 drives. Reliability is also through the roof. A 10x improvement over other 10K RPM drives in nonrecoverable error rates help protect against rebuild errors when a drive does go down.

BELKIN
1500VA Battery Backup with Tower: $199
www.belkin.com

A NEMA 5-15 ELECTRICAL socket, the standard socket you’d find in most homes and businesses, is rated for 15 amps at 125 volts, or a maximum of 1,500 watts. As a result, there’s a limit to the power protection you can sell your customer without having to bring in an electrician to wire in a larger connection able to deliver more power. Belkin’s 1500VA Battery Backup unit pushes the upper bounds of that limit, which should give your customers plenty of time to shut down most mid-range servers and workstations gracefully in the event of an outage.

The tower offers eight battery-protected outputs, simultaneously delivering 1,000 joules of surge suppression and automatic voltage regulation so that the signal passing out of the UPS is clean and stable. Management is achieved either through a USB port on the client side or through an optional SNMP card, which allows the VAR to monitor status over a network connection.

VMWARE
Infrastructure 3 Virtualization Suite: $1,000
www.vmware.com

THE WORLD THINKS VIRTUALIZATION IS AN IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY After all, virtualization lets your customer consolidate hardware, making it possible for multiple software environments to take advantage of the horsepower leveraged by multi-core processors and 64-bit operating systems.

The Infrastructure 3 Suite includes VMware ESX Server, used to virtualize servers, storage, and networking; the VMFS cluster file system; Virtual SMP multiprocessor support; Consolidated Backup for protecting virtual machines; and VMware’s VMotion zero downtime migration too.

There’s a long list of reasons why you’d want to deploy a software package such as Infrastructure 3 in a multi-server environment. For SMBs, scalability ranks up at the top. The prospect of saving rack space in a small office is an attractive idea. So are ease of management, high availability, and defi nable hardware resource allocation, three of VMware’s other Infrastructure 3 value propositions.

SUPERMICRO
SuperBlade: $Price Varies
www.supermicro.com

WHEN IT COMES TO PACKING PROCESSING POWER INTO THE SMALLEST possible space, blade servers give your customers the most bang for their buck. The only problem for resellers is that blades are usually highly integrated branded boxes. Supermicro’s SuperBlade pulls supercomputing within reach of the channel by offering the pieces you need to build complete solutions: the enclosure, blade modules, a management console, networking add-ons, and power supplies.

The enclosure itself takes up 7U of rack space and accommodates up to 10 hot-plug server blades. Each of those blades functions as a 1U box normally would, leveraging up to two quad-core CPUs. But by packing them in vertically, you’re able to upsell the benefits of much higher density. Moreover, installing the blades into a dedicated enclosure helps cut down on cabling messes, serves multiple modules with fewer power supplies, and enables easier management of computing resources through a remote KVM.